Brado

Young, buzzy and inviting, Brado welcomes you in, sits you down, surprises you with its unconventional menu, gets you a little giddy with decent Malbec for under R$50 a bottle, and sends you on your way, happy, well-fed and not feeling out of pocket. In short, it’s our kind of place.

The colourful, open-plan space spanning the ground floor and yard of a 1950s white-washed brick house charms by day, with sunlight shining through the vines on the yard’s glass roof, and enchants by night, when legions of hanging candles are lit.

The menu – a fun, broadsheet-sized affair, packed with arty illustrations – is eclectic, to say the least. Fish korma sits alongside the likes of chimichurri steak and wok-fried chicken. Brado describes it as ‘food with a conscience’, with buzzwords like ‘local’ and ‘seasonal’ peppering their website.

The menu changes twice a year, winter and summer, though with more than twenty possible mains, the menu feels a bit big to be wholly seasonal, while ingredients like salmon – imported from Chile – rack up the food miles. But maybe we’re just sore at only spotting the free filtered water option once our waiter had opened and poured six bottles of mineral water.

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Eco-credentials aside, what Brado’s menu is all about is fun, vibrant and reasonably priced food. Foams feature here and there without being pretentious – more of a playful approach to comfort food than a beginner’s attempt at contemporary cuisine.

Our pork ribs (R$42), slow-roasted and tender, came with a sweet, not-quite-sticky-enough molasses coating, toasted manioc flour farofa, the boiled root veg mandioquinha, and a zingy lime foam. Other highlights were the fantastically crunchy batatas bravas (R$20) – potato wedges smothered in aioli and chilli sauce. Less gratifying was the lamb dish, parmentier de cordeiro (R$40), whose layers of pesto brocolli and mashed potato were crying out for some sauce or gravy.

Whatever you do, leave room for one of the beautifully-presented desserts – we loved the chocolate brownie with intense coffee ice cream and a sour squirt of passion fruit foam (R$16).